Like a lot of students I worked in a bar to help pay my rent. Not a bad job, it fitted in with my studies and was flexible. But what I didn’t like was getting home gone midnight, exhausted, with my hair and clothes stinking of tobacco smoke. I’d wake up the next morning and my sheets would smell of it too.

So years later, when I was recruited by ASH with the primary aim of getting legislation to prohibit smoking in enclosed public places, I wanted to make sure pubs, bars and clubs were included.

Uruguay is celebrating 10 years as a smoke-free (SF) country in 2016. When it banned smoking in public spaces and workplaces a decade ago, it became the first county in the Americas, and only the fourth in the world, to do so.

China is the world’s largest tobacco producer and consumer. One-third of the world’s smokers live in the country where tobacco control is a work in progress, but also a protracted war with the tobacco industry.

Eight years! That was how long it took Jamaica to adopt tobacco control regulations after ratifying the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

2005 was a good year for Jamaica: the FCTC was ratified, a series of progressive tax increases were levied on tobacco products, and draft tobacco control legislation was prepared. But for the next eight years there was limited progress on tobacco control in spite of the work of the Jamaica Coalition for Tobacco Control (JCTC) and the Ministry of Health.

Hotels, restaurants and cafes had been smoke-free in The Netherlands since July 2008. In July 2011, a new decree came into force that exempted small cafes with an area of less than 70 square metres from the smoke-free provision. CAN, a public health NGO, sued the government, claiming the exemption violated Art 8(2) of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

The suit also claimed the exemption violated Recommendations of the Council of the European Union, and principles of anti-discrimination, equal treatment, prohibition of arbitrariness and legal certainty. The lower court found CAN's arguments groundless and dismissed the case. But on 26 March, the Court of Appeals of The Hague overturned the lower court's judgment, invalidated the exemption, and ordered the government to enforce the law in full.